For this important announcement: jet lag sucks ass, but it sucks even worse if you’ve got a six-year-old who can’t sleep past 4am and can’t keep QUIET.  Holy crap, I was weeping into my pillow this morning I was so exhausted and furious, and then had another exciting bout at breakfast, too tired to hold it together.

I will just say: I now appreciate the carpeting at home in a way I didn’t before.

On the agenda for today:

* buy earplugs

*take nap

* do not murder offspring, who is no doubt as exhausted as I am.

Edited to add: I did get a nap, and it did get better, and I believe Byron will be sleeping later tomorrow, as utterly exhausted as he was by the end of today.  Also, he knows Daddy’s gonna read him the riot act if we hear so much as a peep before six - and I have exclusive sleeping-in rights tomorrow, not to mention ear plugs.  So.  Rest will be had!  At any cost!  And tomorrow night the grad students come over for D&D!

So apparently whenever Scott and his group need supplies, they trek on out to Joyful Honda.  What IS Joyful Honda?  It’s like a Home Depot, plus a Target, plus a big grocery store, all combined together into one joyful mess - with a mall and a movie theatre tacked on for good measure.  We didn’t even get into the craft barn or the giant garden shop - where you can buy enormous decorative stones, among other things.

But here’s the entrance.  Does it not fill you with existential joy?

No?  More like dread?  Well, I guess you had to be there.  The produce section has twice the selsction of the regular grocer’s, and astonishing things like apples that don’t cost 150 yen apiece (of course, they also aren’t dressed in decorative apple frocks, but see, we uncouth Canadians will happily buy naked apples).

Byron was really, really drooping by this point.  So much so that we went in and out of the Lego shop in the mall, and he didn’t even pitch a fit that the one Lego set he wants more than anything in the world was right there and we didn’t buy it for him.  Too tired to pitch a fit is TIRED.  To perk him up, we stopped for a beverage.

It was some kind of grape drink out of a vending machine.  We sat around while he drank it - and sat, and sat, and kept asking him whether he was done, and he wasn’t done, and we sat some more, and OMG wasn’t he done yet?   Was he too tired to drink?  How long could it take to empty a bottle that size??

A long time, it turns out, if what you’re drinking is this:

Why yes, that IS a picture of jello on that bottle, and the katakana reads “zeri” (jelly).  And we had noticed these things, when we bought it, but Scott and I both had failed to register the information because we were like, Naaah!  Nobody would put jello in a bottle!  That would be silly!

But no, it was grape jello.  And Byron sucked it all down, slowly, and informed us it was delicious.

Where does one even begin?  I’ve been buzzing around the house taking pictures of all the appliances, for goodness sake.  Maybe I’ll run an Appliance of the Week feature, but I can’t stick them all in here today.

Yesterday we took a walking tour of the neighborhood, learning where the grocery stores are, and the crappy little park, and the other physicists.  That was our morning.  In the afternoon we had a big double-feature adventure, driving to a nearby Buddhist shrine and then on to JOYFUL HONDA - not, as you might expect, a purveyor of happy cars, but rather a store.  No, a mall.  No, a CIVILIZATION unto itself.

Here’s the shrine first, though, so you really believe we’re in Japan.

There’s water trickling out of the dragon’s mouth, and you’re supposed to use the dippers to wash your hands and rinse your mouth out (maybe?  We didn’t see anyone using it).  Byron was so charmed by this little hut that he hurried eagerly to the next one, which turned out to be the smoking hut.  We thought about persuading him that the standing ashtrays were ceremonial in some fashion, but decided we were warping him enough already.

This, in particular, creeped him out:

That’s the guardian of the gate.  Byron took one look at him and said, “I’m tired.  I’m really, really tired.”  He probably was tired (jet lag! super evil!) but I believe what he really meant was “Holy shit that guy is scary!”  Because he was:

This particular sect (which Scott is going to e-mail me the name of, because my brain is full of the holes like Swiss cheese) has strong ties to Tibetan Buddhism, and is famous for doing exorcisms, so there’s a lot of demons in their worldview.  This dude’s job is to scare the evil demons.  Trying not to read too much into the fact that he scared my boy…

This shrine is very off the beaten track, and doesn’t cater to tourists, which meant - bonus! - we didn’t have to pay to go in, but also we didn’t really get to go very far inside.  I don’t have pictures from inside the main building, therefore, but we glimpsed a monk and smelled the incense.  Here’s one of the pagodas, which were up behind the shrine.

And here’s a shot from the nearby graveyard:

Byron was very quiet and respectful both places, which has me feeling optimistic that we can take him more places like this.  Then again, we also noticed yesterday that he was too exhausted to pitch a fit, so maybe we were a little bit lucky.  In any case, it was fun - not as showy as the temples and monasteries we saw in Kyoto, my other time in Japan, but still very interesting.

Joyful Honda deserves its own entry!  Plus, it’s time this boy and I got our day started.  We have ahead of us a busy day of, uh, finding stuff to do!  Watch out Japan!

Just a quick entry here to let y’all know that Byron and I made it to Japan, live and unbruised!  Scott picked us up at the airport and drove us up to Naka-city, to our new home among the rice fields (seriously!), narrow streets, and neon-lit commercial strips.  It’s a peculiar place.  I think pictures are going to have to do some of the talking for me.

Those are coming soon!  Just getting our bearings today…

Edited to add:

Byron, exhausted, in the car (The Doilymobile!) on the way to Naka-city -

I can barely believe it!   The three weeks since Scott left have dragged by endlessly, and yet here I am feeling completely unprepared to travel!

I suppose that’s normal.  One can’t plan for every contingency (especially when travelling with a child), so there’s this tendency to second-guess your packing endlessly.  Will I be bringing enough for him to do?  Could I bring one less thing, spare my shoulders a little, and still have enough?

Then I remember what Scott said: “If Byron has a bad time during the flight, he’ll bring it DOWN!  With his MIND!”  And I realize that, ah yes, we might get a bit bored, but it won’t be the end of the world.

I’m not sure when you’ll hear from me next.  Not tomorrow.  Probably the day after.  Madcap Japanese adventures!  I know you can’t wait!

The last day of school came and went without a hitch.  I realized, though, that I didn’t have a picture of Byron and his teacher!  I took a pic on the very first day, with the teacher he had for three weeks, but never took one with Ms. Natasha.  Maybe I was afraid she’d disappear too!

Anyway, here they are, on the last day of school.  Byron is reading her a story he wrote, with a certain amount of difficulty: he can read, but he can’t spell, so reading what he wrote is almost impossible, unless he remembers it in detail… which in this case he didn’t.

He is painfully sounding out words that sound like nothing when you try to read them that way.  But Natasha, that old pro, enjoyed it ANYWAY.  She’s that good.

And now, the home stretch to Japan…

It made me giggle, anyway: Is Mark Sanford America’s first emo governor?

Hat tip Joey Manley, founder of Girlamatic, who linked to it on Facebook.

Tomorrow is the last day of school.  Ms Natasha already has most of the classroom packed up.  Apparently the teacher to whom the room will belong next year wants to start moving her stuff in and organizing things this very afternoon.

We will miss Ms Natasha, but I am assured that ALL the other teachers are just as wonderful.

Yeh.  I wasn’t born yesterday.  There’s wonderful, and there’s “wonderful in a way that works well with my boy”.  So, we’ll see.

But I’d say B is off to a great start, academically: he loves school, he’s confident, his manual dexterity has increased a hundredfold, he’s curious and excited to go back for Grade 1.  We could not have asked for a better school year than we ended up having, despite the turmoil and uncertainty at the beginning of it.

It makes me just a little choked up, seeing all those boxes in the schoolroom!   But I’ll tell you, it’s nice to be reminded what an impact a great teacher makes, on everyone’s lives.

* Sorry I missed yesterday!  I am so very, very distractable!

* It was my cyberpunk novel distracting me, but I got to 60K words and decided I need to  back off for a bit so I can concentrate on the many important things I have to do before we leve for Japan in less than a week.

* Like working on my D&D campaign, for example.

* What?  That’s important!  If I’m not prepared, Scott and Dan will walk all over me.  Maybe even Caio, who’s from Brazil and has never played before.  And how embarrassing would THAT be?

* Answer: super duper embarrassing.

* I think it’s going to be fun.  My campaign is loosely inspired by Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork books: enormous complicated city; ethnic neighborhoods; benevolent (?) dictatress determined to clean up town, or at least make it carry a hankie; city police force and neighborhood bosses, sometimes clashing, sometimes in cahoots.  It has great potential, to my mind.

* I just have to somehow make it WORK.  I’m Vetnari in this scenario, but neither as ruthless nor as clever.  Fingers crossed!

* And here, for your amusement, my lad building the Library of Celsus out of dominoes!

So we went to our annual Vancouver Canadians game today.  I wasn’t sure we’d get one in this year, since we’ll be gone most of the summer, but Byron’s tee-ball league sold tickets to today’s game, and we got in on it.  Only two other kids from his team got tickets, however, and we only saw one of them at the game.

And I wish we hadn’t seen him, in some ways.  Byron was really enjoying the game - like, actually following balls and strikes and understanding what was going on - for a couple innings until this kid (call him Jimbo) showed up and started being distracting behind us.   Finally, Jimbo’s little brother fell over the back of our bench and landed in our popcorn.  Seriously.  It startled the hell out of us, as if the kid had fallen out of the sky.  Byron was very upset about it, but I think he might have recovered except that the minute I set the popcorn bag back on the bench, Jimbo deliberately kicked it over.

To his credit, Byron didn’t pitch a giant fit right there.  He did insist that he wanted to go home, and I didn’t argue with him.  But he was just waiting until we got home to pitch the fit, alas.  And then we had another one at bedtime.

I’m probably just lucky there hasn’t been more of this, with Scott gone.  I know I’m lucky.  Doesn’t make it much easier to deal with, though.